But what he did was worse than fight her. At least in a fight, you have to hear each other’s argument. Rowan took away her willstones. He took away her voice.
Lily wasn’t sad yet. She felt embarrassed and off balance, like someone who’d put her foot down hard, expecting there to be one more step on the stairway, only to stumble in front of everyone. She couldn’t stop thinking of the night they’d spent together, and what a fool she’d been to give herself to him. It hit her in waves, alternating between the heat of shame and the chill of disbelief. He knew what had happened to her in the oubliette, and he still did the same thing to her that Gideon and Carrick had done. He’d robbed her of her will.
In the early morning hours, Caleb decided that they’d gone far enough and called a halt to rest the horses and eat. Everyone chewed mechanically, like they had no appetite. It wasn’t just fear of what they faced in the west that stole everyone’s spirit. They had all lost someone they’d loved. Lily wasn’t the only one Rowan and Alaric had turned against.
And poor Juliet—Lily stared at her sister’s swollen face and shaking hands. Juliet looked as wrecked as Lily felt, but Lily couldn’t cry like her sister. Not yet. Maybe not ever. It had been Lily’s decision to listen to Lillian in the first place, and then her decision to take Lillian’s side. She had walked into this with open eyes, and she had to keep them open or they could all die out here in the Woven Woods. Crying was a luxury, a release she couldn’t afford.
After they’d eaten, Lily felt strong enough to talk. “What happened?” she asked.
“I’ll tell her,” Breakfast said with a tired sigh. “Well, for starters, I finally found out why everyone kept mistaking me for an Outlander. It’s because there’s another me here.”
“He’s the young shaman in training that we were trying to locate for you when you were first here,” Tristan said.
“He was on a vision quest on the Ocean of Grass,” Lily recalled.
“He came back. And I met myself.” Breakfast’s tone was even, but his expression was still one of shock. “And myself said that he had spirit walked into these places called cinder worlds.” Breakfast shook his head to clear it. “Anyway, so Red Leaf—that’s his name—came out against the bombs. He said that he’d seen this mistake made on other worlds, and that Alaric would wipe out the Outlanders along with the cities.”
“How did the tribe take it?” Lily asked.
“A lot of braves were angry that Alaric hadn’t told them about the bombs and that he’d planned on using them without consulting the rest of us,” Caleb said. He threw something into the fire in agitation, showing that he was one of the angry ones.
“So that did happen,” Lily said.
She shivered, realizing that if she hadn’t hallucinated seeing two Breakfasts, she hadn’t hallucinated seeing Carrick. She rubbed her cheek repeatedly, trying to scrape away any trace of the blood he’d marked her with—as if they’d both been responsible for shedding it.
“Were you conscious while you were in the cage?” Una asked. “Your eyes were open, but Rowan said—” She suddenly broke off, stumbling painfully over Rowan’s name. She’d trusted him, too. Una had learned to love Rowan like a brother. It was an honor she’d never given anyone before, and the loss of him had hurt her deeply.
“I wouldn’t say I was conscious, but a few things managed to sink in,” Lily said quietly. “Keep going.”